From Facebook to Your Website

Your challenge of using Social Media to promote business can be solved by a simple process. Here we will show one three-part solution to attracting more visitors to your website. Some assumptions are made about your computer skills and the form and content of your website and blog, and we’ll explain those along the way.

For now, consider these as being the first three requirements:

You have a website.

You have a blog.

You are a Facebook user (perhaps with a business page.)

Your website: Here we assume that when people land on your website, it’s obvious to them what you want them to do there. If the only thing on the homepage is this phrase: “Call now to learn more – (760) 555-5555” – your visitor knows what to do. So, keep it simple. Of course, most people want to know a bit more about you and your services or products, so you’ll want to feature the best of what you have to offer, in a clean and clear format. Groups of three make sense and for many people, it’s a small number of things to consider, and enough to tell most of the story about what you are selling. Give them easy to follow navigation, so they can dig deeper if they need more information, but keep the opportunity to contact you in front of them at all times. Your phone number and links to your email, or a contact page should be right there, so when they are ready to make the purchase, they can easily take that important step of connecting with you; and your website has done its job!

Your blog: This is where you have the opportunity to focus on any number of topics. You can post about any aspect of your business; the value you bring, what makes you or yours the best, the level of dedication or experience you bring, or you can go completely off topic and post about some event or some personal experience you have that allows your readers to know you as more than a salesperson; to know you are a REAL person. It may seem counterintuitive to not be always driving toward closing a sale, but people do business with people. So, if they get to know you, they make like you and trust you, and that may be why they call you in the end.

Your Facebook (business page): You can use a personal page on Facebook, if that’s where you get more attention from people who do business with you. The difference between a business and personal page on Facebook is outside the scope of this article, but you can click that link for more information. (Just be sure to come back here to finish this exercise!)

Use Facebook as a place to say; “Hey, look at this!” Knowing that Facebook changes all the time, you have the opportunity to post there as often as you like, and you can re-post the same links back to your blog or website as often as makes sense, to keep your blog content and business website in front of people on a regular basis. This is the “good news, bad news” feature of Facebook – the impression you make there is fleeting. That is the very reason you need a blog and a website – you need to provide a stable place where your prospects can go to get the information they need about your business to make buying decisions. Posting links to blog articles (with graphics, don’t forget) is the easy way to feed fresh new material to your friends and followers, so it won’t seem like you are posting the same old thing over and over. I’ll touch on this again in the summary.

Summary:

The three components of this article were provided in that order for a purpose. Your website is the ultimate destination, your blog is the connector, and Facebook is the “in your face” place where you can keep on saying, “look at me!” and people might do just that.

Without a website, you have no place to provide the static information people need when making buying decisions. For about twenty years now, we’ve been saying; “If you don’t have a website, you’re not REALLY in business.” That may sound heavy-handed, but hey, we are website developers and we want you to do business with us.

Blogging may be new to many people, as a way to drive business, but there are many businesses now whose entire business is based on their blog. For you, a blog is a place where you can continue to provide fresh new content (what Google loves…), so you can drive traffic to your website and give your Facebook fans something to consider on a daily (or more often than that, if you are so inclined) basis. With a few lines on Facebook and a link back to your blog, along with an eye-catching image, your blog give prospects a place to learn more about you and your business, before they click into your website for the full story.

Looking back at the title of this post, you might think it odd that Facebook came last in the order of things. However, your website and your blog have to be there, for this whole thing to make sense! Look again through this article, click some of the links, and if you follow me on Facebook, you’ll see the image and the link to this article there.

For more information on Mousehelp and Rouzell, click either of those links to land on my pages. Now, go write your next blog post, with links to your website, and post up on Facebook. I’ll be looking for you there.